Tech volunteers to help school students

A group of professionals from the city are working on a project to develop problem-solving abilities among students.

TNN | Updated: Jul 18, 2016, 03:17 IST

(Representative image)

Pune: A group of professionals from the city are working on a project to develop problem-solving abilities among students. The group will produce special content to teach computation and logic in schools apart from training teachers on how to use the content efficiently.

As of now, the English version of the content is distributed free of cost among 15 schools in the city. The group is also developing a Marathi version in an effort to reach out to Pune Municipal Corporation-run schools from the next academic year. In time, the group aims to establish itself as a reliable, free e-learning content producer that strengthens primary school education across the country.While the content which is currently in English is given free of cost to about 15 varied schools in the city, the Marathi version is being developed and will be given to Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) schools on a pilot basis in next academic year. The group also aims to spread its wings to other states in the future as a reliable free e-learning content producers for strengthening digital primary education in the country.

The group that initiated the process is part of the not-for-profit organization Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) India chapter, which is one of the largest computing societies in the world. Its education initiatives produce and update curricular recommendations. ACM India's Education Committee has started CSpathshala, an initiative to create a curriculum standard to teach computing as a science in India, with plans to roll it out in schools across the country by 2030.

"As we participate in the digital revolution, we need to train our children to be technology creators and inventors while teaching them to be socially responsible citizens. It is therefore imperative to teach computing, which promotes problem solving, computational thinking and critical reasoning skills, on par with Mathematics and Sciences," said R Venkatesh, chairman ACM India education committee.

CSpathshala is an initiative to bring a modern computing curriculum to Indian schools. "As part of this initiative wWe will create curriculum and teaching aids in the form of lesson plans, presentations to be used by teachers and worksheets that can be adapted by teachers. We will also train teachers on the use of these aids," said Vipul Shah, head of the CS Pathshala initiative.

The initiative sees volunteers from different parts of the country as well as USA. "Finding new volunteers from across the country is a challenge. Also, as we have several vernacular languages therefore translation of content is quite difficult into multiple languages is a challenge. We will set up a crowdsourced translation platform soonto help translate the content to different languages. Building infrastructure is also a difficult task, especially in rural areas. To address the same, we are creating a lot of content that has pen-and-paper-based activities and does not require use of computers," Shah added.

Director of Walnut School Nikhil Karkare is a volunteer who helps design the content for CSPathshala. "We focus on digital literacy and teach students various languages but when they go to the industry they are in for a rude shock as they have not developed a computational mindset. Through this initiative, we try to teach students how to break down any problem and use computational technique to solve it," said Karkare.

Sonali Gogate, who worked in the IT industry for 20 years, is also a contributor and reviewer for the program. "We make sure that the concepts introduced are age appropriate. The language is kept simple and examples provided are related to the day to day life of a child. We also use animation to make sure students stay interested," she said.

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